On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 10:54, Sumana Harihareswara
<sumanah@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 02/20/2012 07:00 AM, wikimediaindia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:23:08 +0530
> From: Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak@gmail.com>
> If you are asking only about technical issues, many communities do log bugs
> from time to time. But when they remain open beyond certain period and the
> person who logged becomes inactive, they go into black hole and there is no
> one to follow up(even if its fixed, they remain open).
There is nothing to be distressed here.
Srikanth, this is distressing to hear! If you could point to some
specific Bugzilla reports that have gone into the "black hole",
including ones that no longer reflect reality, I could help ask the
localisation team to follow up and at least put some updated information
in the issues at bugzilla.wikimedia.org .
They are called "black hole" for the reason anyone(apart from the filer / folks who conversed) might not be able to easily spot them. In most cases the bugs lack update from the filers / language communities. But again if the filer is from one generation and has retired, who does the follow up? Ideally language support teams must do it. But all of us know Indic communities have very few people to look into these and the common pattern I have found across few communities I have interacted is that spending time on bugzilla / improving technology/language support is not going to change things big way, so I might as well be contented (Ex:- "Why Narayam when js works fine") with whats there and do my editing. But at some point, communities need to focus on these, as and when the communities grow, they will also get contributors who are interested in supporting the language technically.
> But the larger
> issues are common and pretty much known to i18n team. (like say PDF
> rendering). I tried cleaning up Tamil related bugs recently which were
> documented here[1] since 2006, also created a tracking bug[2].
>
> But then as someone else said, "People are just waiting for one more
> tracking bug to fix those. !" //So tracking bugs don't help beyond a point !
This is also distressing to hear! I'm not quite sure what was implied
there -- did the speaker mean that the localisation team won't address
certain problems until there are more tracking bugs to help track
issues, or something else?
The quote was from one of the bugs I remember seeing on bugzilla, said by someone on a totally different bug nothing related to localization. The point I implied quoting it was "process for the sake of it doesn't help much beyond a point". Adding tracking bugs does not impact the age of the bug. The bugs remain open either because they are hard to solve / lack of bandwidth / lack of input / variety of other reasons, not because no one is tracking them. Adding a tracking bug wont magically fix the bug / help in the getting it to closure. But tracking bug serves useful especially for anyone new to see what are problem areas, how can I help fix / test / not report duplicate bugs etc.
> Most, if not all Indic issues would be tagged with i18n keyword on bugzilla.
>
Yes, adding the i18n keyword to an issue in Bugzilla will help bring it
to the attention of the localisation team.
Another point, Not all Indic wikipedia related issues are i18n issues, though there might be heavy overlap. There are site requests like changing logo,namespace, installing extensions <<whatever>>. The point to note is, when someone does these things in any Indic community(which already have tiny community), please keep the community widely posted / document these somewhere.Not just issues, but solutions/workarounds, gadgets used, things like abuse filter rules(if any) and its rationale behind etc. This will help someone else in your community(who may come years later) to follow up even if you retire / had forgotten. Fortunately Tamil Wiki community did that from the beginning(at least the major ones,if not everything) in the form of a page[1] and I was able to go through,know the past issues,update it after almost 2 years! I felt a tracking bug might be easier to track on issues than a page, so I just created one.
Thanks for mentioning this problem, Srikanth.
This problem is not restricted to bugzilla. This may even happen in say in translation or anything, where only a subset (ideally 1-2 in a community of 10) involve in the activities and do not document / pass over the knowledge properly.Smaller Wikipedias must not rely on select individual on anything so much that they become extinct/dormant after their wiki-time (Insert story of Bishnupriya Manipuri) I hope Shiju is reading and might be able to relate to it / research on solutions :)